Descent
by Sigridhr
Summary: Imprisoned in Odin's dungeons, Loki's thoughts begin to catch him up.


**Rating**: PG-13

**Trigger Warnings:** Suicidal thoughts

**Notes:** Written for Marvel Committee USA's drabble contest on Tumblr, where it placed first. This probably qualifies as AU, given what was shown of Loki's captivity in the _Thor 2_ trailer. Leans a little bit (with love) on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's _The Yellow Wallpaper_.

* * *

There was nothing dignified about being dragged back to Asgard in chains and brought before the throne of Odin, disgraced and defeated, but Loki kept his head up and walked in as if he had just returned from a glorious victory. In truth, he was frightened. Odin did not often give clemency, especially where betrayal was concerned, and Loki was unprepared to be conciliatory enough to receive what little might be offered. The dungeons of Odin had broken greater men than he before. But he had walked the void and returned, and he would not be cowed by his impostor father now.

The door to his cell slammed resoundingly behind him, and it seemed to echo within the room like a physical, claustrophobic presence. Seating himself against the far wall, in a posture of affected ease that his mind certainly did not share, Loki waited.

Nothing came.

Food was delivered by unseen attendants, an endless, monotonous cycle of broth that left him parched and aching for something he could not quite articulate. There were no questions, no punishments. It made him anxious, waiting. Each time the tray of food banged against the compartment he had to bite down to keep from jumping, expecting the door to be flung open. It made him angry, and he shouted, throwing his broth at the door and pounding at it with his fists, daring Odin to come down and face him. He called him a coward, bellowed it until his throat was raw and his knuckles bled.

There was only silence. It rang hollow in the wake of his fury, mocking him, and he fell backwards, like a marionette with its strings cut.

No one was coming. He was alone. And worse, he was utterly afraid.

It was, Loki mused to himself, the most effective means of torture Odin could have devised. Neglect gnawed at him like a festering wound. There was nothing Odin could say to him that would be worse than the sound of his own thoughts, for no one but he knew how deep his failures ran. He felt each of them as keenly as a knife wound, with no distractions to mitigate the pain. There was nothing to do but remember now.

His thoughts filled the empty room like flies, relentless and impossible to ignore as they buzzed about his head, growing louder the more he swatted at them. They crawled out from under his skin until he wanted to rip it off just to make them stop. They hissed at him from dark corners, and laughed when he caught them out of the corner of his eye.

There was a scene carved into the walls of the room showing the battle of Jotunheim, with Odin as centrepiece, Gungnir striking a death blow to a kneeling Jotun. Loki kept himself on the far side of the room from it, though, sometimes he felt the bite of Gungnir against his own chest, and, in the flickering torchlight, it seemed as if Odin's eyes were watching him.

He turned his back.

Sometimes he could hear laughter, ringing off the walls like a cascade of bells, beating in time with his heart as it raced faster and faster until it was a cacophany of sound that made him scream, and made Odin press Gungnir down into his chest until he couldn't breathe. As he lay there, panting like a man long submerged who had just come up for air, he realised the laughter was his own.

_Madness_. The word ran circles around his thoughts, hovering at the edge of his vision like a grim _memento mori_.

He began to see Thor, watching him from the corner of the room, and he cried, begging for him to leave or come closer – sometimes both at once. He could hear, sometimes, the sound of feasting from above, and he wondered if Thor stood above him now, Mjolnir in one hand and ale in the other, so drowned in his own contentment that he was deaf to all else. The Thor in the corner watched him pityingly, and Loki told him to go away.

Odin and Thor watched him all the time now. He travelled all around the cell, and everywhere he felt their eyes upon him. He crept into the corners, pressing himself against the wall, but it did no good.

Loki laughed at them. Let them watch. He would give them nothing to see.

He lay still as he could, staring up at the ceiling. There were voices that seemed to drift down from above, and he pulled them apart like he was carding wool. Some were warm like firelight, and filled his soul with a tingling heat like brandy on a cold day. But the voice of Thanos ever spiraled above him like a vulture, picking at his corpse no matter how many times he tried to bat it away and insisted he was not yet dead.

He saw the face of Laufey in the mural on the wall, who bared his teeth at Loki and called him traitor to his own kind. Loki wore his fingers to the bone trying to pull Gungnir from the wall and stab Laufey with it, but the spear seemed to slip through his hands like smoke, and Laufey darted away from him, calling him bastard over and over.

He tried to stab himself with Gungnir, then, but there was nothing but air between his fingers. He lay, crumpled, on the floor, and gradually the mocking voice of Laufey faded away, leaving him hollow. He could feel the cold of Laufey's blood in his veins, and it hurt. He felt a gnawing shame, and he convulsed, contorting himself as his grief stretched the limits of his body, pushing his limbs to articulate something he couldn't understand, or abide.

When he looked up again, it was his own face he saw in place of the Jotun's on the wall, and at last he understood.

Odin had won.


End file.
